An Embarrassment of Riches

A Voice Like Honey over Smoke - by Helen It's the voice. Someone described Rick Bragg's voice as 'honey over smoke'. That intrigued me. I listened to a CD copy of Rick Bragg reading The Prince of Frogtown. That Alabama rhythm caught me, that pure Southern sensibility; the words just seem to flow. The storyteller's magic takes over.

In All Over but the Shoutin' Rick Bragg wrote about growing up poor in the hill country of Alabama, especially about his mother picking cotton and cleaning houses so her boys would have more than the welfare checks she received. Rick's father was an alcoholic man and very violent. He seemed to float into the life of the family and out again at regular intervals.

The author Willie Morris once told Rick that he would never have any peace until he wrote about his father. In The Prince of Frogtown, Rick pieces together the story of his father's life from interviews with his faithful boyhood friends.

The people seem so real. His father, Charles, was destroyed by drink and destroyed by his hard scrabble, blue-collar life in the mills of Jacksonville, Alabama. Yet Rick lets the soul's true light shine through the awfulness.

You can't help but like this young mischievous, hell-bent for leather boy. Rick retells one incident where Charles and his friend were flying a kite so high that it was nearly invisible in the sky.

Another boy comes along and asks, "What you doing with that string?"

"Why we're fishing," Charles answered.

You ache for the alcoholic man and the family that he has let down. Rick does not whitewash or rewrite his father's life. You get a sense of the man that could have been, but for that evil drinking and the streak of violence that resulted from that drinking.

No one is more disappointed than Charles himself. He knew he could not be with his family, that he had ruined all the chances of a life with them by his ceaseless drinking and violent temper.

Interspersed with chapters about his father are chapters about "the boy" Rick's stepson. In these chapters, he describes his own journey into fatherhood and his growing love for this boy. This story gives light and humor to a dark tale. You grow to love this boy and his stepfather who tries so hard.

Now I want to read Ava's Man, the story of Rick's maternal grandfather and the culture that shaped him.

I Heard it On the Radio - by Emily-Jane

Our guest blogger is Emily-Jane, a reference librarian at Central and Belmont libraries, and a regular contributor to Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You, where you can read her latest raves about books and films that have something to do with current news stories.  

There's a real trend in public radio these days for shows that focus on storytelling. The long running story show This American Life has been joined by Snap Judgment, Re:Sound, The Moth Radio Hour, State of the Re:Union, and Radio Lab, all shows centered around personal narratives, anecdotes, and other tales. The focus on stories brings the human element to the forefront in these shows, and let me tell you, I am hooked. I haven't been so in love with the radio since I was a kid in the 1980s, in the midst of another fad in public broadcasting: radio theater.

Starting in the late 1970s, regular series like NPR Playhouse, Earplay, and National Radio Theater of Chicago presented drama miniseries every week.  Some were imported from abroad, and some were produced in the U.S. Many were dramatizations of popular novels or adaptations of films, and if my memory serves, an awfully high percentage were some kind of science fiction. I wasn't too picky – I memorized the radio schedule and listened faithfully to whatever story was on offer. And although I haven't found any regular radio dramas on the air in Portland nowadays, I can still get my radio play fix at the library!

The most famous public radio dramas of the 1970s and 80s, no doubt, were Star Wars and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but I think my personal favorite was The Fourth Tower of Inverness. It's a mystery/science fiction tale about Jack Flanders, a likeable young man who travels to visit his aunt Lady Sarah Jowls at her mansion, Inverness.  The place is fully stocked with odd characters – the Madonna Vampira, Old Far-Seeing Art, a million-and-a-half year old Venusian named Little Frieda, Dr. Mizoola the alchemist, and several others. Lady Jowl's husband, Lord Jowls, is missing, having disappeared some years before into the mysterious fourth tower (most folks only see three towers on the mansion, but Jack sometimes catches a glimpse of that fourth one), and Jack sets out to find him.  With, of course, the help and hindrance of all the other strange folk who live at Inverness.

I listened to The Fourth Tower of Inverness originally when I was about 12 years old, and always remembered it fondly – especially the introduction to each episode when the narrator announces in stentorian tones, "The FOURTH. . . TOWER . . . of INVERNESS."  My that gave me chills!  So, when I realized the library had it on CD I listened to it again.  Here's what my adult drama critic has to say: This is a weird, weird story with a major helping of spiritual and quasi-spiritual concepts: past life regression, Sufi mysticism, shamanistic communication.  The narrative is erratic and the sound effects are wild and vivid.  The characters are boldly drawn, but less cartoonish than you might imagine. The mystery is indeed mysterious, the setting is compelling, and the theme at the beginning of every episode gave me the same chills it did when I was a child!

If The Fourth Tower of Inverness suits you, there are a number of other radio tales about Jack Flanders.  If not, never fear – you can get a wide variety of other radio dramas, including This American Life, at the library. 

Double Pleasure - by Helen I seem to be at a crossroads in my life now and two books that I read recently have sparked me to do some deep examining. The first is a mystery by James Sallis called Salt River. His main character, John Turner is an ex-policeman, ex-con, war veteran and former therapist who wonders, "how much a man can lose and how much music he can make with what he has left."   

One of the characters talking about the troubles of a young man says that the boy had a hard life, "Not making apologies, and I know he brought a lot of it on himself. But there wasn't much that was easy for him, such that you had to wonder what kept him going." Turner then muses, "I had been wondering that, ever since I could remember, about all of us."

One thing that keeps me going is the pleasure I find in good writing, like this sentence spoken by Doc Oldham in Salt River, "Got more wrong with me than a hospital full of leftovers. Asthma, diabetes, heart trouble. Enough metal in me to sink a good-size fishing boat."

Part of the great pleasure of the second book, The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry, was listening to Wanda McCaddon read it on CD as I read it.  I sometimes read ahead of the recording; sometimes listened to fresh parts that I hadn't read, told in the narrator's rich Irish accent. What a nice way to enhance the reading!

The story reveals two very different versions of an Irish girl's life. Roseanne McNulty, once the most beautiful girl in all of Sligo, is incarcerated in the Roscommon Mental hospital. Now 100-years old, she is writing her life story and hides it beneath the floorboards in her bedroom. Meanwhile the hospital is preparing to close and her caregiver, Dr. Grene is evaluating the patients to decide which ones can be returned to society.  He begins to visit Roseanne and to listen to her story. He also discovers a document written by a local priest whose story of Roseanne is very different from her own tale. As they come to know each other, they uncover long buried secrets about themselves.

Roseanne says, "My father's curious happiness was most clearly evident in the retelling of this story. It was as if such an event were a reward to him for being alive, a little gift of narrative that pleased him so much it conferred on himself, in dreams and waking, a sense of privilege, as if such little scraps of stories and events composed for him a ragged gospel." 

I think that this is also true of Roseanne and the telling of her own story and how she coped with the events of her life. Along with her story, we are given glimpses of life in a small community in Ireland from the early part of the 20th century to the present time.

Roseanne and Dr. Grene come to respect each other. He says, "There has never been a person in an old people's home that hasn't looked around dubiously at the other inhabitants. They are the old ones, they are the club that no one wants to join. But we are never old to ourselves. That is because at close of day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body."
   
Dr. Grene is also grieving the recent death of his wife."Too much thinking on death. Yet it is the music of our time. As the millennium passed fools like myself thought we were about to taste a century of peace." Roseanne observes him with compassionate eyes, "he was looking into that strange place, the middle distance, the most mysterious, human, and rich of all distances. And from his eyes came slowly tears, immaculate human tears, before the world touches them."

How can you go wrong with such lovely language!

Read With Your Ears - by Lee, guest blogger (listen)